It’s important for business leaders to understand how to interpret some specific IT metrics and thereby to evaluate employees whose work falls within the IT focus area. It could be difficult to assess particularly those involving help desk ticket.
Time for Ticket Resolution
Closing a help desk ticket is a baseline approach to assess the ticket efficiency of the company’s IT department. While many observers look at the number of help desk tickets opened in a given period it is also important to assess how many were closed or resolved, and what was the average time to resolution. Once a ticket is created, either an internal or external IT resource receives an alert. Upon fixing the issue, the IT worker then closes the ticket to indicate that it has been resolved. At first glance the tickets opened and closed throughout a given period tells us how many were resolved and what was the speed of resolution. The number of help desk tickets closed within a set time period gives a measure of the state of the IT department, whether it’s in-house or outsourced.
Help Desk Ticket creation trends – Departments and type of tickets generated
Apart from understanding the time for the resolution it is also important to assess ticket creation trends such as the type and source (department) of tickets. A help desk ticket can be generated by the company’s hardware or software automatically or by employees who have an issue with some technical aspect.
Speed to ticket resolution is as important as the number of tickets created per set time period…
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While the number of tickets opened and closed throughout a given period are important it is also necessary to concentrate on the total count of tickets generated each month and look for trends. The trend line of new help desk tickets being created can reveal important and critical aspects of the help desk and its efficiency. For instance, an upward trend in the average number of new help desk tickets in a month is a sign of impending trouble. Therefore speed to resolution is as important as the number of tickets created per set time period.
Companies need to find ways to drive down the average number of help desk tickets opened each month and a proactive one would look to drive down the help desk issues. The department can thus find time to find ways to integrate applications, run better reporting methods, and leverage different technologies.
Recurring issue frequency
IT support professionals encounter a number of issues that repeat or recur from time to time. While these can be fairly quickly and easily solved, it can be a painful experience for IT support. However, there are ways to minimize recurring issues and the time spent dealing with them. Efficient ticketing and automation using a ticket system is one way to handle this. IT departments can make their help desk more efficient by providing documentation in the form of FAQs or support guides. This documentation can answer questions before a user contacts support and it shows a user that these issues are likely and being looked into. Another method of reducing recurring requests employed is to introduce a forum where the tech savvy and more accomplished people could help others. A forum could provide free help and save the IT department from recurring issues. The help desk should also set realistic time frames and communicate that to users so that the user refrains from sending further emails.
Help desks are not just support tools but provide strong indicators for assessing IT support…
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Ticket re-assignment rate
Reassignments are caused by service desk or by level 2 after their preliminary troubleshooting if service level inadequacy is noticed. This could be due to inadequacy of technical training and awareness in Service Desk. Re-assignment by level 2 troubleshooting may indicate the lack of knowledge or appropriate skill set in the support staffs. Re-assignments affect service level and it is important to understand the resultant impact on SLAs by conducting an analysis. A process owner should know which category has the most number (and percentage) of reassignments for making system improvements and reduce the impact and chances of such incidents.
Help desks are thus not just tools for the support team to deliver operational support. They also provide strong indicators on how well the IT support environment is performing. However, it is also important to understand and ensure the performance of the support function by looking at specific matrices.
Source
- http://www.netgainit.com/blog/blogusing-helpdesk-tickets-to-assess-your-companys-i-t-strength/
- https://www.isupport.com/blog/deal-recurring-support-issues/
- http://www.numerify.com/mature-your-it-operational-processes-with-ticket-assignment-analysis/
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